Quote Originally Posted by Soukyuu View Post
- People saying debuff classes would be useful in raids miss the fact that to be able to participate in raids those playing the class would have to leech themselves from 1-50, since debuffs are useless in normal partying as it is now
Not really. It just means their methods of dealing damage would be less direct. It's what differentiates a straight out nuker like BLM from a guy that stacks dots on the mob and has abilities with damage modifiers based on those dots to do similar overall damage.

Assuming we get Necromancer, NEC's starting attacks in a rotation could be three debuffs that deal damage over time while having secondary effects. Say, Curse (DoT + lowers damage resistance), Exhaust (DoT + lowers accuracy and evasion), and Bane (DoT + lowers elemental resistances). Then they can toss in "nukes" that scale in potential damage depending on how many debuffs they have up on the mob. It wouldn't be doing the exact same damage as a BLM in terms of damage per spell, but it would perform equally between DoT damage and "nuke" damage.

As far as other enfeebles, this is why you can't have a class entirely devoted to debuffing (and why I suggest spreading debuffs between the classes and jobs). Buff/debuff has to be built in to a greater whole, because they are tertiary aspects of gameplay and should never be the raison d'etre of a job/class.